Last month a founder I’d just started working with forwarded me an email and asked, half-joking, whether it was a scam. It opened with ‘Dear Sir/Mam’ and offered him ‘high quality guest posts’ on sites with ‘DA 60+.’ I told him it basically was. Not a scam in the wire-fraud sense, but the kind of link that does nothing for you on a good day and earns you a penalty on a bad one. High quality backlinks are the opposite: genuine, editorial links from credible, relevant sites that pass real SEO value, help improve search engine rankings, and send targeted traffic from other websites your customers actually trust.

The email was really standing in for a bigger question he had underneath it: do backlinks even still work? Google keeps saying they matter less. He’d read the think pieces.

Short version, and I’ve written about the longer one separately if you want the full case for whether backlinks still matter in 2026. Yes, they work. For founders, SEO professionals, marketers, business owners, and any website owner trying to improve a site’s visibility in search engines, that’s still the practical answer. Google has publicly downplayed them, and the specifics of what Google said actually change how you should build links, so I’ll get to that in a second. But ‘links still work’ and ‘the way most people build links is a waste of money’ are both true at once.

What changed isn’t whether you need links. It’s the bar. And the strange thing about a higher bar is that it’s good news if you’re willing to clear it, because most people won’t. Ahrefs analyzed a billion pages and found 66.31% of them have zero backlinks. Not a few. Zero. Two-thirds of the web is sitting in the unlinked pile. There’s also a well-documented correlation between referring domains and search traffic, and while correlation isn’t causation, the pattern is consistent enough that every working SEO plans around it. That’s why backlinks still matter to search engine optimization in 2026: they’re still one of the important factors behind online visibility, organic traffic, and stronger search engine results, even as search engines give low quality links, unnatural backlinks, and link-farm tactics far less weight. So you don’t need a thousand links to stand out. You need a handful of genuinely good ones your competitors don’t have.

Quick word on what Google actually said, because it’s the thing that makes the rest of this make sense. In 2016, a Google spokesperson called links one of the top three ranking factors. By 2023, Gary Illyes from Google’s search team said at a conference that links aren’t in the top three and haven’t been for a while. Then in 2024, Google itself said it has made links less important over the years, and one of their reps added that Google needs very few links to rank a page. Read that cold and you’d conclude links are dead. Don’t. Every one of those same people also said, in the same breath, that links still matter. What they’re telling you is that low-effort links carry almost no weight now. A link from a site that sells placements to anyone with a credit card is worth roughly nothing. A link from a publication your customers actually read is worth a lot. That gap is the whole game in 2026.

So this isn’t a pitch to buy backlinks or chase vanity metrics like domain authority in isolation. It’s a practical backlink strategy for building high quality links with real content quality behind them: why backlinks still matter, what changed in modern backlink building, and seven ways to earn authoritative backlinks, including original data, journalist sourcing, guest posting on relevant sites, reclaiming unlinked mentions, analyzing competitor backlinks, broken link building around a dead link or outdated resource, podcast and roundup outreach, and creating a valuable resource people want to cite. Here are the seven strategies I’d use to earn the second kind.

1. Publish something nobody else has

The best link I’ve ever built for a client wasn’t built. It was earned, over and over, by one page full of original numbers.

Publish data that doesn’t exist anywhere else and the people who write about your topic have to cite you. Not because they like you. Because you’re the source. Original research, a survey of your own customers, industry surveys, data benchmarks, an analysis of your anonymized data, even a simple ‘we looked at 200 of these and here’s what we found’ study. Writers need statistics to make their points, and there are only so many places to get them, which is exactly why these assets build high quality backlinks.

This one is slow. You won’t see links the week you publish. But a good data page keeps pulling them for years, which is the opposite of a guest post that gets you a single link and then goes quiet.

2. Be a source, not a pitch

There’s a whole category of link building where the journalists come to you. For years that meant HARO, short for Help a Reporter Out, where reporters posted what they needed and you sent a quote.

If you’ve been out of the loop: HARO got rebranded to Connectively, and Connectively shut down at the end of 2024. The brand got bought and brought back in 2025 as a free email digest, but everyone scattered to other tools in the meantime. The ones people actually use now are Qwoted, Featured, and Source of Sources, usually two or three of them at once.

The mechanic is the same whatever the tool. A reporter needs an expert quote on a deadline. You give them a sharp, specific, genuinely useful answer fast that helps the publication’s audience, not just the reporter. They run it and link to you. Done well, this is a digital PR tactic that can earn high authority backlinks from major news sites.

Two honest caveats. Speed wins, because the good queries close within hours, so this only works if you check daily. And a lot of big publications mark these links nofollow, meaning they don’t pass authority the way standard high quality dofollow backlinks do. I still think they’re worth it, since the brand mention and the referral traffic are real even when the link is nofollow. Just go in clear about which links are doing which job.

3. Guest posting where your customers actually read

Guest posting earned its bad reputation honestly. Most of it is the ‘Dear Sir/Mam’ stuff from the top of this post: a network of low-quality sites that take anyone’s article for a fee, packed with links nobody reads.

Real guest posting is a different animal, and it still works. The test I use has nothing to do with domain rating: would my client’s actual customer read this publication and trust it? A DR 75 site with fake traffic and AI-spun content is a liability. A DR 35 industry blog your buyers genuinely read is an asset. We’ve built our whole approach around that distinction, and I put together a checklist for vetting a link building service if you want the full version of how we separate the two. Editorial placement inside the article body carries more seo value than a throwaway author-bio link.

Write something the publication would have wanted even without the link. That’s the bar. If the article only exists to carry your link, editors can smell it, and so can Google, and the best placements are on relevant sites your customers actually read.

4. Reclaim the unlinked brand mentions you already earned

This one is almost free, and most people never bother.

Somebody out there has already written your company name without linking to it. A roundup that mentioned you, a blog that quoted you, a reporter who named you and forgot the hyperlink. Those unlinked brand mentions are the easiest links you’ll ever get, because the hard part, convincing someone you’re worth mentioning, already happened.

Set up an alert for your brand name with Mention or BuzzSumo so you can spot new references from a website owner as they appear. When a new unlinked mention shows up, send a short, friendly note to site owners thanking them and asking if they’d add a relevant link. The ask converts well precisely because they already decided you were worth talking about. You’re not pitching a stranger. You’re tidying up, so keep the email brief and explain how the link helps their audience.

5. Raid your competitors’ link profiles

Your competitors have already done your prospecting for you. Every site that links to them is a site that’s demonstrably willing to link to a business like yours.

Run a link gap analysis: pull the backlink profile of three or four direct competitors and analyze competitor backlinks to find the domains linking to two or more of them but not to you. Those overlapping domains are your warmest targets, because a site that links to several of your competitors clearly covers your space and clearly hands out links. Reviewing a competitor’s backlink profile can provide valuable insights into the same sites already linking in your niche, and the sites linking to competitors are often easier outreach targets because they already link to businesses like yours. This is one of the first things we do on a new campaign, and I’ve written about how we approach prospecting and link building if you want the mechanics.

One note on ‘competitors.’ I don’t mean whoever sells the same product. I mean whoever ranks for the keywords you want. Sometimes those are completely different companies, and the second list is the one that matters for links.

6. Get on podcasts and into roundups

Some of the most durable links I’ve seen came from a person, not a tactic.

Go on a podcast in your niche and you almost always get a link in the show notes, plus targeted traffic from an audience that already cares about your topic. Get included in an expert roundup, the ‘we asked 15 founders’ kind, and you get a link plus your name next to everyone else’s. You can also pitch resource pages or link roundups on relevant sites as another relationship-driven placement. Build a real relationship with a business that complements yours and you’ll keep finding natural reasons to link to each other from other websites.

These don’t scale neatly, which is exactly why they hold up. They’re hard to fake, hard to buy, and hard for a competitor to copy by throwing money at it. The links that are annoying to earn tend to be the ones that last.

7. Build a free resource people can’t help linking to

The last one is a cousin of the first. Instead of data, build a tool. Or use the Skyscraper Technique by improving a top-performing piece or an outdated resource so your version is more useful to link to.

A free calculator, a template, a checklist, a small utility that solves a real problem in your niche. People link to useful free things, because linking is how they share them. broken link building works on the same logic: find a dead link on a relevant page and offer your content as the replacement. If you spot broken links on pages in your niche, a focused blog post or tool can become the valuable resource a webmaster is happy to swap in. A consultant who links to your free template is doing their reader a favor and building your link profile as a side effect.

This takes real work up front and almost none afterward, which is the trade I’ll take every time over a link I have to renegotiate every month. Build the thing once. Let it earn links while you sleep.

The link you already control

One more, and it isn’t technically a backlink, but I’d be doing you a disservice to leave it out.

Before you chase a single external link, look at your own internal links. You have complete control over them, they cost nothing, and most sites use them badly. Point your strong pages at the ones you’re trying to rank. It’s the highest-leverage link work there is, and it’s the work people skip because external links feel more impressive. Get your own house in order first, then go earn the outside stuff.

What I’d actually do first

If you’re starting from zero, don’t attempt all seven this quarter. Pick two. Don’t chase volume blindly, but do answer the question of how many backlinks with some context: over 96% of top 10 Google sites have 1,000+ backlinks from unique domains, so scale matters over time as long as quality stays high. I’d start with reclaiming unlinked mentions, because it’s the fastest win, plus one linkable asset, a data page or a free tool, because it compounds while you do everything else.

Then give it time. A good backlink strategy is part of a successful SEO strategy and works on a six-to-twelve-month horizon, not a six-week one. We once ran a campaign that built 261 links to a client’s revenue pages, and the search engine rankings climbed steadily the whole way, right up until the client wound down the business for reasons that had nothing to do with SEO. I wrote that one up as a backlink case study because the numbers are some of the cleanest proof I have that this works when you do it properly: build quality backlinks to the pages that make money, track at the URL level, and think in compounding terms.

None of this is fast, and none of it is a trick. But it’s the line between links that lift your rankings and links that quietly drag them down. If you’d rather hand the whole thing off, that’s what we do at Shortlist, and you can see how our link building works or just tell us what you’re trying to rank and we’ll tell you honestly whether we can help.